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No Room for Christian Sluggards

Paul Tautges serves as senior pastor at Cornerstone Community Church in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, having previously pastored for 22 years in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Paul has authored eight books including Counseling One Another, Brass Heavens, and Comfort the Grieving, and contributed chapters to two volumes produced by the Biblical Counseling Coalition. He is also the consulting editor of the LifeLine Mini-Book series from Shepherd Press. Paul is a Fellow with ACBC (Association of Certified Biblical Counselors). He and his wife, Karen, are the parents of ten children (three married), and have two grandchildren. Paul enjoys writing as a means of cultivating discipleship among believers and, therefore, blogs regularly at Counseling One Another.

2014Dec 27

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Do you put off jobs until another day? Have you got work to do, but just can’t get round to doing it? Why do you lack motivation? Adam Embry gets to the heart of this issue: it’s not to do with a lack of willpower, but because we are controlled by sin and so fail to be the wise and diligent workers God created us to be. The solution is found in the gospel.

In the new discipleship counseling booklet, HELP! I Can't Get Motivated, Embry takes on the unspoken sin of laziness. He writes in the Introduction:

The problem with laziness is that we fail to live as the people God created us to be. The imagery used in Scripture to describe the lazy individual was meant to remind God’s people that the sin of laziness is rooted in the fall, when Adam and Eve, the ﬁrst man and woman, disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. The consequences of laziness are disastrous, as laziness destroys our well-being and our relationships with others, and, most importantly, it costs us our lives. So what is the solution? Buying a motivational poster? Having better self-esteem? Channeling our inner energies? No; the solution is the gospel: that Jesus Christ came to die for our sins. He paid the punishment we deserved for our sin—sin such as our laziness. He rose from the grave in order to give us spiritual life, to reconcile us to God, and to give us his perfect righteousness as a gift (1 Peter 3:18; 2 Corinthians 5:21). As a result, we can now live to please God. So how does transformation come from the gospel? It comes by understanding that laziness can be defeated when we work to please God and serve others.